On successive refinement for the Wyner-Ziv problem with partially cooperating decoders

A successive refinement model in which each receiver observes its own side-information, while the side-information pair is stochastically degraded with respect to the source, is considered. It is further assumed that a one way conference link with given capacity exists between the decoder observing the degraded side-information and the one observing the higher quality side-information. Inner and outer bounds on the rate-distortion region are derived. Our bounds are partially tight in the sense that the characterization of the primary encoder rates is conclusive, the remaining gap being in the characterization of the conference encoder rate.